I am interested in the cognitive mechanisms underlying social and political behaviour, notably leader choice and cooperation. In particular, I adopt an ecological and evolutionary approach to better understand the inter-individual differences in these domains, across both space and time. To do so, I rely on behavioral data, social surveys, computational modeling and, more recently, the analysis of cultural artifacts such as paintings and books.

Publications

Safra, L., Baumard, N., & Chevallier, C. (2018) No strong evidence that authoritarian attitudes are driven by a lack of control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Meyniel, F., Safra, L., & Pessiglione, M. (2014) How the brain decides when to work and when to rest: dissociation of implicit-reactive from explicit-predictive computational processes, PLoS computational biology